Think Exist

The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

Laughter is also a form of prayer.

Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured.

Heightened consciousness, the art of paying attention, enriches us and deepens our humanity; it gives us the opportunity to attend to the intricate texture and density that our experience offers. It helps us monitor our choices so we won’t endlessly repeat habitual mistakes. When we attend to what causes others pleasure and pain we increase our capacity for compassion and our penchant for justice. Ignore the grimace or joyful gesture of your friend or lover at your own peril. Turn your gaze from the hungry person on the street and everyone pays a price for that strategic omission. Every moment matters more when we retain an embodied consciousness. Certain Buddhist sects call this concentration “Mindfulness,” but this conscious awareness also serves as a kind of religious tenet of poetry.

I wish I knew why I’ve kept writing poems. I don’t. I do know this: whenever I write a poem, I wonder how it would sound if delivered from one of my parents’ pulpits. There needn’t be beeswax candles or widows slumped praying in the front pews, but there has to be that feeling of reverence, of being at once elsewhere and at home. I am addicted to the space a poem creates. Poems are sanctuary and mystery, like an empty church to a child, a place in which attentiveness and clarity mix with memory and belief. Poetry, like church, is an act of community, a sharing of blessings and burdens, and maybe that’s why I want so badly for people to read [my book].

It is strange that people ask for proof concerning the possibility of a kind of [transcendent] knowledge instead of searching for it and verifying it for themselves by understanding the work necessary to acquire it.

When a man is singing and cannot lift his voice, and another comes and sings with him, another who can lift his voice, the first will be able to lift his voice too. That is the secret of the bond between spirits.